The water pot felt heavy that day in 2023, but not as heavy as the choices that would follow. Walida Abdullahi, then 19 and a Senior Secondary School 2 student in Anku village, Hadejia Local Government Area of Jigawa State, stood at the well doing what she had done countless times before—fetching water for her family.
A woman approached. Mariam smiled. She talked. She offered something that sounded like hope.
Today, nearly three years later, 22-year-old Walida sits in a Department of State Services facility in Abuja, cradling an infant daughter, caught between the life she lost and the one she is desperately trying to build. Her story is one of betrayal, captivity, resilience, and a freedom so complicated it feels like another form of confinement.
This is her odyssey.
Chapter One: The Lure
The conversation at the well seemed innocent enough. Mariam was friendly, persuasive, painting pictures of opportunities beyond the confines of Anku village. For a young girl still in secondary school, the promise of something more was intoxicating.
“She made it sound so easy,” Walida recalls in an exclusive interview with Daily Trust, her voice carrying the weight of hindsight. “I didn’t know I was walking into a trap.”
What Mariam presented as opportunity was anything but. Walida soon found herself in a house filled with other young women, all living under what she describes as “questionable circumstances.” The reality of her situation became horrifyingly clear when unknown men began visiting the residence.
“They came and went,” Walida says, her words carefully chosen, her eyes avoiding direct contact. “They did things with us. We received nothing. I received nothing.”
The house was a trafficking operation, and Walida had become one of its victims—trapped, exploited, and far from home. Her dreams of completing secondary school evaporated into a nightmare of sexual exploitation.
Chapter Two: The New Identity
When illness struck, Walida hoped it might be her escape. Instead, it marked a new descent. Mariam moved her to another town, but not to a hospital or back home. She was taken to live with Mariam’s husband, Abdullahi Isiyaku, and his co-wife—a domestic arrangement that quickly revealed itself as another prison.
The physical abuse began almost immediately. Beatings became routine. But perhaps the cruellest assault was on her very identity.
“They took my name,” Walida says, her voice breaking for the first time. “I was no longer Walida Abdullahi from Hadejia. I was ‘Chinasa.’ Mariam told everyone she was my mother. They erased who I was.”
The forced identity change was more than psychological torment—it was a trafficking tactic, severing her connection to her past, making her disappearance harder to trace, transforming her into someone who could be more easily controlled and exploited.
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For months, she lived this stolen life, answering to a name that was not hers, submitting to a “mother” who had kidnapped her, enduring abuse from people who treated her as property rather than person.
Chapter Three: The Failed Escape
Desperation eventually overwhelmed fear. Walida made a break for it, fleeing the house and making it to the road. Freedom seemed within reach. Then she saw the soldier.
“I ran to him,” she recounts, the memory still raw with disappointment. “I thought soldiers protected people. I thought he would help me. I was wrong.”
Instead of rescue, she found betrayal. The soldier intercepted her and returned her to her captors. What followed was a beating so severe that Walida still carries the injuries—visible scars on her body, invisible ones in her psyche.
“They beat me until I couldn’t stand,” she says quietly. “Then they moved me again.”
This time, the destination was Abuja—Nigeria’s capital, hundreds of kilometres from her village, from her family, from anyone who might recognize Walida Abdullahi or even “Chinasa.” In the anonymity of the city, she would be even easier to disappear.
Chapter Four: Locked in Abuja
The house in Abuja was occupied by several other women, all living under similar restrictions. Walida’s movement was completely controlled. She was locked inside, watched constantly, her world reduced to walls and windows that offered glimpses of a freedom she could not touch.
“I stopped counting days,” she admits. “Time just… passed. I was alive but I wasn’t living.”
The months blurred together through 2023 and into 2024—a year of captivity in plain sight, hidden in Nigeria’s bustling capital where millions went about their lives, unaware of the women trapped in houses scattered throughout the city.
But Walida had not given up. She watched. She waited. She planned. And when the moment came in 2024, she ran again.
Chapter Five: Lost and Found
This time, she made it out. But freedom without direction is just another form of being lost. Walida wandered through unfamiliar areas of Abuja, a young woman with no money, no phone, no identification, and nowhere to go. She had escaped captivity only to find herself homeless in a city of strangers.
Eventually, her aimless wandering brought her to Airport Road, one of Abuja’s major arteries. She must have looked desperate, frightened, out of place—because someone noticed.
“A man stopped and asked if I needed help,” Walida recalls. “His name was Sir Rochy. He gave me food. He did not ask too many questions. He just helped.”
That act of kindness sustained her temporarily, but she still had no permanent shelter, no plan, no way forward. She continued moving through Abuja’s streets, surviving day by day, until she encountered another stranger who would change the trajectory of her story.
His name is Ifeanyi. He identified himself as an operative of the Department of State Services, the secret police. He offered what Walida had not had in years—food, clothing, and shelter.
“He didn’t just give me a place to sleep,” Walida says. “He gave me back my dignity. He asked me what I wanted. No one had asked me that in so long.”
Chapter Six: New Life, New Complications
What began as rescue evolved slowly into something more complex. Walida, traumatized and vulnerable, found in Ifeanyi not just a protector but companionship. A relationship developed—one she insists was consensual, though questions about consent in the aftermath of trafficking remain complicated.
“I know what people think,” Walida says defensively. “But he didn’t force me. For the first time since Mariam approached me at that well, someone treated me like a person, not property. I chose to be with him.”
The relationship produced a daughter—a baby girl born into uncertain circumstances but also into the first stable environment Walida had known since leaving Jigawa State. Motherhood gave her purpose, something to protect, a reason to envision a future.
For months, this became her life: living with Ifeanyi, raising their daughter, existing in a bubble that kept her past at bay. She did not contact her family. She did not report her trafficking. She simply tried to be normal, to be safe, to be free.
But the past has a way of refusing to stay buried.
Chapter Seven: The Call Home
January 1, 2025, began like any other day, but something shifted inside Walida—an overwhelming, inexplicable need to reconnect with the family she had left behind. She could not fully explain it, even to herself.
“I just suddenly needed to hear my father’s voice,” she says. “I needed them to know I was alive.”
With Ifeanyi’s assistance, she made the call. Her father answered. He had been searching for her for months—frantic, heartbroken, desperate for any information about his missing daughter. The relief in his voice was palpable.
But relief quickly gave way to complications. When Walida’s family members travelled from Jigawa to Abuja, they expected to find their missing daughter and bring her home. What they found instead was a woman with a child, in a relationship with a man they had never met, living a life they did not recognize.
The reunion became a confrontation.
Chapter Eight: Impossible Demands
Walida’s relatives demanded she sever all ties with Ifeanyi immediately. They insisted she return to Jigawa. And most devastatingly, they told her to leave her daughter behind.
“They said I couldn’t bring the baby,” Walida recounts, her arms instinctively tightening around her child. “They said I had to choose—come home and leave everything or stay and lose my family forever.”
Her uncle made remarks about her fate that Walida refuses to repeat in full, but which terrified her more than her captivity had. She heard not concern but threat, not rescue but punishment.
“He said things about what would happen to me if I came back,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “Things that made me afraid of my own family.”
There were also accusations about her religion. Family members claimed she had been coerced into changing her faith—a charge Walida vehemently denies.
“I make my own choices about God,” she insists. “No one forced me to do anything with my faith. That’s mine alone.”
The situation escalated until it could no longer be contained within the family. Someone—sources differ on who—reported the case to security authorities. Given Ifeanyi’s position with the DSS, the matter was taken seriously. Walida was brought to a DSS facility for her own protection while investigations began.
Chapter Nine: In Limbo
Now, Walida sits in a kind of bureaucratic limbo, neither free nor imprisoned, protected but confined. DSS sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirm they are investigating multiple aspects of her case.
“There are serious allegations of trafficking, sexual exploitation, and prolonged captivity,” one source explains. “We’re also investigating the circumstances of her relationship with Ifeanyi, and very importantly, her current safety given alleged threats from family members.”
The investigation is trying to untangle a web of questions: Who was Mariam, and where is she now? What happened to Abdullahi Isiyaku? What about the other women Walida lived with—are they still trapped? How did trafficking networks operate so openly? Why did the soldier return Walida to her captors instead of helping her?
And perhaps most complicated: Is Walida’s relationship with Ifeanyi genuine, or is she experiencing a trauma bond with someone who provided safety when she was most vulnerable? Can she truly exercise free will after years of having it systematically stripped away?
Chapter Ten: Her Choice
Walida is adamant about one thing: she will not return to Jigawa without her daughter, and she will not be separated from Ifeanyi.
“Everyone wants to decide my life for me,” she says with rare fire in her voice. “Mariam decided. Abdullahi decided. That soldier decided. Now my family wants to decide. But I’m the only one who should decide what happens to me and my child.”
She acknowledges the complexity of her situation but resists the narrative that she is simply moving from one form of control to another.
“I know what it’s like when someone takes your choices away,” she says firmly. “I lived that for years. This is different. This is mine.”
But observers remain concerned. Trafficking survivors often struggle to distinguish between genuine choice and the psychological aftermath of prolonged abuse. The power dynamic between a trafficking survivor and a security operative who provided rescue raises ethical questions that investigators are still examining.
Way Forward
As of now, Walida Abdullahi remains at the DSS facility with her daughter. Her family waits in Jigawa. Ifeanyi’s fate hangs in the balance pending investigation outcomes. The alleged traffickers—Mariam and Abdullahi Isiyaku—remain unnamed and apparently unpursued.
The investigation continues, but questions multiply faster than answers. Each layer of Walida’s story reveals another layer beneath it. The clear-cut rescue narrative dissolves into something far more complicated—a tale of trafficking, trauma, survival, agency, and the impossibility of distinguishing between freedom and the illusion of freedom when you have been controlled for so long.
Walida’s odyssey began at a village well three years ago with a conversation that changed everything. Where it ends remains unknown. She is caught between worlds—between the family that claims her by blood and the family she has created in the aftermath of trauma, between her identity as Walida Abdullahi of Hadejia and whoever she became during the lost years.
“I just want to be safe,” she says, rocking her daughter gently as afternoon light filters through the facility windows. “I want my baby to be safe. I want to decide my own life. Is that too much to ask?”
In theory, no. But in practice, for a 22-year-old woman whose autonomy has been violated repeatedly by different parties claiming different forms of authority over her body and her future, even that simple desire remains frustratingly out of reach.
The odyssey continues. The destination remains uncertain. And Walida Abdullahi, survivor of trafficking, mother of one, caught between multiple definitions of freedom, waits to see which version of her life will ultimately win out—the one others want to impose, or the one she is desperately trying to claim as her own.
All parties mentioned in allegations of trafficking have yet to be officially charged or provide statements. The investigation by the Department of State Services and other security agencies continues. Walida Abdullahi remains in protective custody pending the outcome of investigations into both her trafficking allegations and her current safety concerns.
*This story was crafted based on an interview published by Daily Trust and snippets of information on the saga of the young lady.
